The Long Slow Death of Jack Kerouac

One of the most widely read and influential American writers of the twentieth century, Jack Kerouac is often misunderstood. At times, in fact, he has been viciously attacked. While his many devotees think of him primarily as a chronicler of road adventures, Kerouac thought of himself as a serious religious writer and never failed to stress this fact to anyone who would listen. Most didn’t. Jim Christy did, and this is the first book to take Kerouac at his word. The Long Slow Death of Jack Kerouac examines the confessions of a twentieth-century St. Augustine and traces the progress of a great pilgrim through the decline of modern civilization. Christy focuses on the last ten years of Kerouac’s life, from the influential New York Times rave review of On the Road until his death in 1969, a period in Kerouac’s life that until now has been dismissed by most biographers as nothing more than a drunken decline. Christy will convince readers that Kerouac was a madman and mystic whose last days were wilder and more fascinating than any of the adventures he wrote about. As Christy reveals, in the last decade of his life Jack Kerouac was racing to obtain his goal of being “safe in heaven dead.”

Jim Christy has published numerous books, and is a sculptor who has exhibited internationally.